Smart grids drag utilities into the swamp of online privacy

Ontario, Canada will have a smart meter in every home by the end of 2010, and …

The smart grid is rapidly becoming a reality in the US, as utilities have been installing networked monitoring and control equipment, both in their own facilities and in their customers' homes. The pace of these installations should accelerate due to recent initiatives from the Department of Energy and the state of California; across the border, the Province of Ontario will see smart meters installed in every home by the end of next year. Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner has now worked with members of the Future of Privacy Forum to analyze the privacy implications of these initiatives. The resulting report indicates that there are a variety of potential privacy concerns, some of which are best addressed before the deployments begin in earnest.

Nearly half of the report simply reviews what the smart grid entails, specifically from the consumer perspective. In general terms, a smart meter, combined with smart appliances and other hardware, will allow consumers to obtain fine-grained information about their energy use patterns, and exercise a greater degree of control over them. As the report notes, this can have a wide variety of positive consequences, from more efficient use of energy resources to lowered electric bills. So the general message is that concerns about privacy shouldn't derail plans to deploy smart grids.

But what we know about preserving privacy in the online realm should definitely inform those plans. Although the report doesn't explicitly make the comparison, the smart grid creates the same sorts of issues that bringing IT to banking did: consumers' personal information became integrated with the larger IT systems of companies, and consumers got access to the data online. Just about every security concern that applies to that financial information can apply to the smart grid.

In addition to the obvious financial risk of having a third party manipulate the real or apparent energy use, energy use patterns, especially if coupled with details of the activity of smart appliances, provide a clear window into a consumer's home. Household habits, from general patterns of activity to the timing of specific activities—when the dishwasher gets run, for example—can help anyone reconstruct the activities of a house's occupants in the same way that having access to banking and credit card records can.

This sort of information, the report indicates, is at risk on a variety of levels. The data itself can be obtained if the security of a utility's IT systems is compromised, either by external hackers or unethical employees. Utilities, like banks and many Web service providers, may be tempted to use or sell personal information for targeted advertising or other purposes, or may simply offer bulk demographic data without properly anonymizing it.

At the consumer level, the same sorts of problems that strike any other online service could hit smart grid portals: poor password protection, phishing scams, etc. Utilities may be tempted to think their customers will know how to protect their power information, but there's little reason to think that would be the case, and plenty of reasons not to.

Even privacy issues that seem distinct to the smart grid actually have parallels in other areas. For example, the report highlights plans for allowing electric vehicles to plug in anywhere, and have that power use tagged and billed to the vehicle's owner. This can potentially be used to track the vehicles owner, with attendant privacy problems. However, the smart grid is hardly alone in creating this sort of risk, as cell phone records, electronic toll transceivers, and even public transit passes have been used to reconstruct the travels of various individuals.

The good news is that, because these problems have become apparent in just about any system that's been digitized, from medical records to electronic mail, we have plenty of experience that could help with avoiding the worst of these problems. The report serves as a good review of the potential problems, and makes a strong case that, since we know they are likely to be problems, the time to adopt practices that should limit their impact is now, during the planning stages.

I'm waiting for the USA to implement the Coke Meter. Every can will be RFID tagged and come with a wifi-enabled embedded device to report which households are drinking more sugar-water than others, and if needed to prevent stores from selling Coke to certain individuals deemed unhealthy.

"Nearly half of the report simply reviews what the smart grid entails, specifically from the consumer perspective. In general terms, a smart meter, combined with smart appliances and other hardware, will allow consumers to obtain fine-grained information about their energy use patterns, and exercise a greater degree of control over them. As the report notes, this can have a wide variety of positive consequences, from more efficient use of energy resources to lowered electric bills. So the general message is that concerns about privacy shouldn't derail plans to deploy smart grids."

Don't kid your self this is not going to save you any money, this is all about charging you more for power usage during peek usage times. Rates will start at were they are now and go up from there. This will allow utilities to obtain fine-grained information about consumers energy use in order to drain every penny they can from your wallet in the name of conservation.

Don't kid your self this is not going to save you any money, this is all about charging you more for power usage during peek usage times. Rates will start at were they are now and go up from there. This will allow utilities to obtain fine-grained information about consumers energy use in order to drain every penny they can from your wallet in the name of conservation.

Ontario Hydro can shove their smart meter. Having lower energy bills is a total blatant lie. The old rate was $.05/kwh (plus delivery charge). The new rate is $.09 during the day, $.08 in the evening, and $.038/kwh after 11pm. There is no way a normal human schedule will give lower bills. And we telecommute so it will be a near doubling of the bill.

The good news is that, because these problems have become apparent in just about any system that's been digitized, from medical records to electronic mail, we have plenty of experience that could help with avoiding the worst of these problems.

The bad news is they probably won't implement any of the proper safeguards and I doubt you have many readers here who trust them to do so.

The good news is that, because these problems have become apparent in just about any system that's been digitized, from medical records to electronic mail, we have plenty of experience that could help with avoiding the worst of these problems.

The bad news is they probably won't implement any of the proper safeguards and I doubt you have many readers here who trust them to do so.

I'm a Canadian and I trust that the proper safeguards will be put in place. Legally, there is no difference between the my personal information that is held by a bank and my personal information that is held by a private utility (or any other private company). My personal information (including my energy usage patterns) are owned by me and can only be used by a company for business purposes pertaining to me (unless I decide to sign away those rights which most people do for some reason...) Americans, on the other hand, should be scared.

The whole "smartgrid" concept is flawed because it is based on the this stupid green fad where people believe power should be rationed. For Pete's sake when everyone in this forum was growing up did you ever think "Oh jeez, I better not use too much electricity today." No we all thought that nuclear power would be plentiful and things like cold fusion power plants would be on the horizon... man humanity is just starting to suck.

Originally posted by xelitus:The whole "smartgrid" concept is flawed because it is based on the this stupid green fad where people believe power should be rationed. For Pete's sake when everyone in this forum was growing up did you ever think "Oh jeez, I better not use too much electricity today." No we all thought that nuclear power would be plentiful and things like cold fusion power plants would be on the horizon... man humanity is just starting to suck.

Yeah, because leaving on the airconditioning full blast all day while nobody is home rocks.

Originally posted by xelitus:The whole "smartgrid" concept is flawed because it is based on the this stupid green fad where people believe power should be rationed. For Pete's sake when everyone in this forum was growing up did you ever think "Oh jeez, I better not use too much electricity today." No we all thought that nuclear power would be plentiful and things like cold fusion power plants would be on the horizon... man humanity is just starting to suck.

Yeah, because leaving on the airconditioning full blast all day while nobody is home rocks.

Why not? I bought the energy, I can do what I want with it. If I wanted to, I should be able to have a machine, that goes "BING" every few minutes and utilises 5kW of power. Because I want to.

The box exists simply to understand when upstream power is or is not available (to balance grid utilization). This can be a DOWNSTREAM comminucation from the grid nodes, and need not be an upstream request. Simple put, a local concentrator can have numerous (say a few dozen to a few hundred) registered meters. It periodically (every 1 second?) sends a notice to all meters it manages with available power indications. When a high yeild applienace wants to turn over (air conditioner), it tells the home meter it wants to turn on and the HOME meter tells it when it can, using a randomized delay of 1-500 seconds based on the current grid status that was reported to it.

the box would potentially be aware of different billing rates by time of day if such polkicies are in effect, and internally (and only internally, accessible by the homeowner, or someone coming to manually inspect the meter, but never automaticaly reporting this data) it loggs the power utilization at time of day into an aggregate power use log. At the billing date/time, it uploads only the power used TOTAL (factord by hourly rates), and reports this to the power cvompany for billing.

The local meter could still respond to grid power availablility, including notices from a local meter every second saying "wait" or "critical hold" or "all clear" or whatever indicatorsd the house meter might use to device how long of a time period to delay a high energy appliance (using a randomized delay). No upstream communication is necessary, no real time systems are reported (exceopt from a neighborhood level), and therefor no private "use and habbit" data could be collected.

Of course, we could simply shoot all the conspiracy theorists and save the trouble as WHO THE FUCK CARES from the perspective of the power company? As long as this use data, if colelcted, was collected by computer for the purposes of localozed use patter analysis (they really don't care about power drain at level below the local transformers), and as long as your personal use data was not available to call center or other staff and was anonymized coming into the system it's OK for them to have this (it's irrelevent for your billing anyway, you have your own local copy in the meter for reference if you need to dispute a bill).

No one is going to get a job at a power company just to spy on people to learn their pattersn in the attempt to stalk them, or break into their house. No government agency cares about when you come and go or how much power you use at certain times of the day, they only care about OVERALL use, not individuals, and especially don;t care about anomolies in the system.

This data might be "private" only in so much as the power company ALREADY identifies you as a light, normal, or heavy user, and anyone driving by can see your lights on or off at any poeint in the day.

Also, since your AC system is likely on all day anyway, as is your fridge, regular paterns for exterior lighting, and more, what energy pattern ARE they going to see? That you do all your laundry in Saturdays? The basic devices in your house are not enough if a shift in your active power draw to show up as more than blips, and are indeistinguisable from other home power events. With your fridge, water heater, AC, and other systems using 60-80% of the power in your house, and assuming you might use some automatic lights, your TV, small appliances, and other items don't register enough of differences for regular patterns to be establishable from generic data. The power company doesn't need to log thsat it's a washing machine, or a stove, making a power request, they only need to identify SOMETHING is making a power request... the rest of the data is irrelevent, and expensive and complicated to colelct, store, and report against, so why would they want it?

Too many people think that just because someone CAN collect data points that there's some reason they'd WANT it. Fact is, it's useless data. And moreso, data that any criminal who wanted it can attain anyway by either spying on you from down the street, through monitoring your set top bax for TV use patterns, through monitoring your internet conenction for activity, and by monitoring your credit cards for when you;'re home and not. What additional data does this really give them? none, just slightly more granular to a several minute interval instead of 15 minute interval, but at that sample rate, it;s like saying 60Hz TV is better than 30, even though your eyes can only discern 28...

Originally posted by xelitus:The whole "smartgrid" concept is flawed because it is based on the this stupid green fad where people believe power should be rationed. For Pete's sake when everyone in this forum was growing up did you ever think "Oh jeez, I better not use too much electricity today." No we all thought that nuclear power would be plentiful and things like cold fusion power plants would be on the horizon... man humanity is just starting to suck.

It has NOTHING to do with RATIONING. It; has to do with GRID STABILITY!!!

You have an air conditioner, a water heater, a plug-in hybrid car, a fridge or two. These things have MASSIVE power draw, but only in periodic intervals. Compressors and other systems (washers/dryters) draw far more power still when spinning up than they even do running.

If you have 100 homes on a local node, connected upstream to a distribution center that 50 other such communities are connected to, and for some stroke of bad luck, 10% of you all have your AC try to spin up at the same 15 second increment, then the grid has to react to that request for significantly more power.

How this happens today is the grid simply brown out for a microsecond while it adjusts, and upstream systems have to kick in, and this requires high cost fats spin-up systems that also happen to be some of the dirtyest energy we use.

If instead, your local meter on your house can monitor your thermostat, and know that in 60-90 secnds it;s going to request power, it can notify the local node (or understand the current state of the local node), and if 30 other houses are all going to do the same thing, then the local node can tell each house but 2 or 3 "wait", and let each of those houses kick over their AC units a few at a time in 10-15 second intervals. Over 4-5 mintes, they can all be spun up an running, and the upstream power station would have known the load was coming, and would have increased output on their wind farm, nuclear plant, or water power system, and the power would have been directed to the local neighborhood node. This will also require less power as aggregate power load is normalized.

This is a cheaoper, cleaner, more effective use of a system, and stabilizing this grid means no localized half second brownouts (ever seen your lights flicker when your fridge comes on?) That in turn leads to longer electronics lifespans.

This has nothing to do with rationing. We can make more power. It has to do with stability, the speed of swithcing systems delivering the poewr, and the cost and clenlieness of the power we can make in that 3-5 minute window.

I find it amusing that people claim they pay for the power and can do what they wish with it. What most people do not understand is that power and water are very heavily subsidized by the government. If people actually paid the standard rate, usage would drop heavily, and the low income family's would not be able to afford power and water.

Seriously, it makes a big difference in privacy whether the power company can see only total use at any time, or the use for each device.

The fact that the power company doesn't care what you're doing in the house, apart from how it affects demand, misses the privacy question. The point is that the data will be available for police. And if it starts being monitored at the level of individual devices, the power companies will probably start selling it for use by advertisers.

You went through 2 gasoline crisis no? Did the US have many oil fired power stations that had a supply problem?

No, it primarily impacted home/institutional heating and automobile use. But it did instill a general conservation ethic, and raised awareness that fossil fuels are a finite resource, which spilled over into electricity. Plus there was the whole money saving aspect.

So yeah, both at home and at school, we were encouraged to save all forms of energy, including electricity. People have short attention spans, though, and i'd guess that even a decade later, that was no longer the case.

Originally posted by Gerino:Why not? I bought the energy, I can do what I want with it. If I wanted to, I should be able to have a machine, that goes "BING" every few minutes and utilises 5kW of power. Because I want to.

Do you also regularly go to restaurants and order a big meal, then dump it in the trash? Because that's the same thing. Sure, there's nothing illegal about it, but it's - how do I put this - asshole-ish?

Originally posted by Deffox:Ontario Hydro can shove their smart meter. Having lower energy bills is a total blatant lie. The old rate was $.05/kwh (plus delivery charge). The new rate is $.09 during the day, $.08 in the evening, and $.038/kwh after 11pm. There is no way a normal human schedule will give lower bills. And we telecommute so it will be a near doubling of the bill.

Yeah, we're paying higher rates for the privilege of having smart meters installed.

Originally posted by Gerino:Why not? I bought the energy, I can do what I want with it. If I wanted to, I should be able to have a machine, that goes "BING" every few minutes and utilises 5kW of power. Because I want to.

Do you also regularly go to restaurants and order a big meal, then dump it in the trash? Because that's the same thing. Sure, there's nothing illegal about it, but it's - how do I put this - asshole-ish?

It also perpetuates the stereotype that (some/many/most) Americans are unable to differentiate between "I can do this thing" and "I should do this thing."

Originally posted by jstephe:"Nearly half of the report simply reviews what the smart grid entails, specifically from the consumer perspective. In general terms, a smart meter, combined with smart appliances and other hardware, will allow consumers to obtain fine-grained information about their energy use patterns, and exercise a greater degree of control over them. As the report notes, this can have a wide variety of positive consequences, from more efficient use of energy resources to lowered electric bills. So the general message is that concerns about privacy shouldn't derail plans to deploy smart grids."

Don't kid your self this is not going to save you any money, this is all about charging you more for power usage during peek usage times. Rates will start at were they are now and go up from there. This will allow utilities to obtain fine-grained information about consumers energy use in order to drain every penny they can from your wallet in the name of conservation.

You know, I am really damn cynical about all this "smart meter" crap too. The ONLY function that a "smart meter" really needs from the perspective of the electrical company is the ability to receive {in real time} rate information from the utility (both current for actual meter calculation) and and of course it would be helpful to the homeowner if the cost forecasts for the next periods (whatever they are) are received too.

The homeowner then would sure as hell LIKE to have some way for this rate information to be displayed, and perhaps communicated to appliances which can then be programmed to make decisions based on rate(s).

Everything else they are talking about IS NOT THEIR GODDAM BUSINESS. There is absolutely no reason for them to be able to collect information from your home about what loads are doing what when, what the nature of these loads are (down to make and model) etc.

Also, once you think about it for a second, there is no effing reason for the algorithms to reside in [i]another expensive widget called a "smart meter." It would be a lot more sensible for the house meter to simply communicate on request to a PC (or whatever), and algorithms there do all the display etc.

Similarly any control function(s) of appliances will almost certainly be handled by microprocessors in these appliances -- so what we are really talking about might be "smart home networks" ... but there is no effing reason that the meter should be the master of such a network, and many privacy reasons for it not to be.

quote:

Zelanni: The box exists simply to understand when upstream power is or is not available (to balance grid utilization). This can be a DOWNSTREAM comminucation from the grid nodes, and need not be an upstream request. Simple put, a local concentrator can have numerous (say a few dozen to a few hundred) registered meters. It periodically (every 1 second?) sends a notice to all meters it manages with available power indications. When a high yeild applienace wants to turn over (air conditioner), it tells the home meter it wants to turn on and the HOME meter tells it when it can, using a randomized delay of 1-500 seconds based on the current grid status that was reported to it.

... I think you have garbled the nature of this rather badly. As you express it, all that complexity would achieve NOTHING, except inserting a random delay before any major appliance could turn on.

There is no reason why air-conditioners would naturally synchronize switching times ... only if they did would such an algorithm help, and in that case it would be simpler just to implement a random delay in the AC unit itself.

Much more likely optimal control algorithms would first include the customer being able to set a price threshold above which the device wouldn't run.

Secondly there might be some sort of functionality like "sometime over night I want this laundry to dry (or this car to charge) ... but you can tell me when." That's much more like what you are talking about.

This scheme amounts to the customer "booking" power ahead of time. The network does like the idea because it allows them to bid the power the buy very accurately across the spread of the foreward times in the bidding pool.

quote:

It has NOTHING to do with RATIONING. It; has to do with GRID STABILITY!!!

You have an air conditioner, a water heater, a plug-in hybrid car, a fridge or two. These things have MASSIVE power draw, but only in periodic intervals. Compressors and other systems (washers/dryters) draw far more power still when spinning up than they even do running.

If you have 100 homes on a local node, connected upstream to a distribution center that 50 other such communities are connected to, and for some stroke of bad luck, 10% of you all have your AC try to spin up at the same 15 second increment, then the grid has to react to that request for significantly more power.

How this happens today is the grid simply brown out for a microsecond while it adjusts, and upstream systems have to kick in, and this requires high cost fats spin-up systems that also happen to be some of the dirtyest energy we use.

If instead, your local meter on your house can monitor your thermostat, and know that in 60-90 secnds it;s going to request power, it can notify the local node (or understand the current state of the local node), and if 30 other houses are all going to do the same thing, then the local node can tell each house but 2 or 3 "wait", and let each of those houses kick over their AC units a few at a time in 10-15 second intervals. Over 4-5 mintes, they can all be spun up an running, and the upstream power station would have known the load was coming, and would have increased output on their wind farm, nuclear plant, or water power system, and the power would have been directed to the local neighborhood node. This will also require less power as aggregate power load is normalized.

You're really over the top ... this isn't what it's about. "Grid stability" isn't what you are thinking it is either.

Grid stability is cycle-by-cycle phase stability. It is a COMPLETELY different problem than what you are discussing.

And your concept of the "local node" predictively dialing up (or down) power from the distribution makes no real sense either. That's not the way the electrical distribution works ... there's no guy driving a truck delivering electrons.

What the information/control you are implying would let the power utility do is to bid more acurately in it's very shortest power-pool slots, and perhaps avoid buying anywhere near so much power in the shortest slots ... but that will not be a major load saver to the generation capacity. And there's no way you are going to send a message to a solar cell array telling it to produce more in 90 seconds ... unless you were just wasting its power before.

quote:

This is a cheaoper, cleaner, more effective use of a system, and stabilizing this grid means no localized half second brownouts (ever seen your lights flicker when your fridge comes on?) That in turn leads to longer electronics lifespans.

No other big load had anything to do with that ... it's just the result of your fridge turning on and the impedance of the lines to your house etc. That's NOT going to change when your fridge turns on ... delaying your fridge a bit does nothing for this.

The really big deal about "smart metering" is the part of the whole thing that nobody likes, but is reality. Instead of there being one price all the time for electricity, there will in effect be a continuous auction, with the price going up and down. You as a bidder can drop out if you don't want to pay the price, by reducing load, turning things off.

It will mean things like "not doing the laundry during the heavy use interval around dinner time" ... because the price of electricity will "encourage" you to do it some other time ... like later in the evening.

Originally posted by Gerino:Why not? I bought the energy, I can do what I want with it. If I wanted to, I should be able to have a machine, that goes "BING" every few minutes and utilises 5kW of power. Because I want to.

Do you also regularly go to restaurants and order a big meal, then dump it in the trash? Because that's the same thing. Sure, there's nothing illegal about it, but it's - how do I put this - asshole-ish?

It also perpetuates the stereotype that (some/many/most) Americans are unable to differentiate between "I can do this thing" and "I should do this thing."

Exactly, and I like being the exception to the rule. I freely admit I use my share of filthy fuels; I drive a car and I don't live in a cave. But I also turn off lights when not in use, use automated thermostats to regulate heating and cooling, etc. Wasting finite resources "because you can" is a moral crime (not in the legislative sense, because it would require some arbiter to define "waste").

Originally posted by Sobad:I find it amusing that people claim they pay for the power and can do what they wish with it. What most people do not understand is that power and water are very heavily subsidized by the government. If people actually paid the standard rate, usage would drop heavily, and the low income family's would not be able to afford power and water.

~

And the government uses our taxes to subsidize utilities so you are paying the market rates one way or another. I don't see how this is relevant to what low income families can or cannot afford.

You ran the dishwasher at 9PM on Friday, November 20, 2009.I can see that as an alibi for a crime you didn't commit.Or, if the crime occurred in your home (or near your home) near that time, it could possibly be incriminating.

How can dishwasher detergent companies profit from information about your dishwasher usage pattern?

I can see AC information being reported by the smart meter. Will the smart meter track things like turning on the TV or computer? Will it track turning on lights?

Originally posted by Sobad:I find it amusing that people claim they pay for the power and can do what they wish with it. What most people do not understand is that power and water are very heavily subsidized by the government. If people actually paid the standard rate, usage would drop heavily, and the low income family's would not be able to afford power and water.

~

And the government uses our taxes to subsidize utilities so you are paying the market rates one way or another. I don't see how this is relevant to what low income families can or cannot afford.

No Boranin: YOU are "not paying the market rates one way or another" ... when the cost of something is subsidized or externalized.

I am incredibly depressed that you would make such a thoughtless claim.

The obvious point is that your incremental cost ... the cost that you actually pay because you chose to consume an addition increment of whatever (or conversely chose to forego that consumption) is smaller than it would be if you paid the full cost.

This is exactly what leads to "the tragedy of the commons." In the old USSR the price of bread was heavily subsidized ... some people who had access to the distribution so they could avoid the rationing fed pigs fresh bread, right from the bakery. (Some bakeries actually ran pig farms ... they took the production credit for "baking bread" but just fed the pigs the subsidized grain.)

That being said, your secondary claim that "that power and water are very heavily subsidized by the government" is also not directly true for most americans.

In all but the most arid areas of the US water per se for homes is not subsidized all that much. (Water for agriculture is an entirely different story.) But sewage treatment costs are generally rather heavily subsidized ... and in a lot of places what charges are made for sewage handling are added to the water bill.

Generally the subsidies on electricity are indirect; except for some of the electricity which is generated and distributed through Depression era (now the previous depression) WPA projects such as Bonneville, TVA, Hoover Dam, etc. That is not the norm or the majority of electricity, and does not dominate the subsidies.

The primary subsidies of the electric industry in the US are two-fold

* the 'subsidies' for nuclear power -- and these are dominated by government/public assumption of risks for major accidents. Secondly there is the fact that the government took responsibility for (and overship of) reactor waste disposal, in exchange for a fixed fee from the nuclear generators ... and of course right now Yucca Mt. is a total fiasco and the government is doing nothing about nuclear waste.

* the ENORMOUS subsidies of the coal industry, particularly that this industry can externalize all the health-care and death costs of coal and coal burning, and all the environmental destruction.

All reasonable estimates put the true costs of electricity produced from coal as far higher than the costs from nuclear ... or from wind and solar.

At the full unsubsidized prices, poor people would be able to afford considerably less total energy consumption, but the primary category of energy consumption that they would see major increases in would be heating fuel, not electricity... and this would hit people most severely in the northeast US ... where lots of poor people live in poorly insulated homes where the winters are cold.

quote:

kriscoberf: I assume the meter is connected to the line just outside the home, so only overall usage is measured. But if it can measure "power factor", you can distingish between lights and motorized appliances.

See my post above -- "smart metering" is a buzzword that means differing things to different people ... but there is a very substantial push in the industry to use "smart metering" as a very intrusive scheme for the electric distributor to be able to obtain real-time end-use-load submetering of your home ... knowing how much of the delivered power is being used for what.

The fundamental issue here again is the capability/need to be able to implement variable rates -- I am not arguing that this is necessary and beneficial. And obviously if the rate is variable this must be communicated to the meter itself, and also communicated to the "home" so that this information can be used to make control choices etc.

But there are industry advocates who want much more than that, they want the electrical power utility to be able to fine-grain sub-meter the home/business ... and potentially want the utility to have control authority over load(s) in the homes, etc.

Originally posted by BadAndy: ...The fundamental issue here again is the capability/need to be able to implement variable rates -- I am not arguing that this is necessary and beneficial. And obviously if the rate is variable this must be communicated to the meter itself, and also communicated to the "home" so that this information can be used to make control choices etc.

But there are industry advocates who want much more than that, they want the electrical power utility to be able to fine-grain sub-meter the home/business ... and potentially want the utility to have control authority over load(s) in the homes, etc.

It's actually all far less pernicious than stated in this thread. From a recent survey* of over 30 C-level electricity industry executives in Australia on what the smart grid means, the concept of controlling the lives of individual customers doesn't even enter into the equation. Couldn't do it if they wanted to, no value in it, and the government and regulatory bodies constrain every dollar they spend as it is, which forces transparency.

What's paying for the whole smart grid infrastructure upgrade - and yes, smart meters are only a component of it - is that with finer grained knowledge of electricity demand, they can spend less money on fuel.

That's it.

It's a simple thing, but it means quite literally billions of dollars in operations costs if they don't have to provide peak use generation capacity when it isn't needed.

A growing population needs electricity to grow, and solutions developed in the 1950's aren't really good enough for the next generation of ipods and electric cars. They want to meet growing demand with more efficient uses of the sources of energy they have available. They have challenges, they're good people, and from what I've seen in the surveys they aren't stupid in the slightest.

*Disclosure: I wrote the analysis based on those interviews. Report is filtering through the industry now (just hit Gartner I believe) and should be more visible from the general media soon.

Originally posted by cargo_cult:Smart grids are designed to handle solar and wind generated electricity, which is intermittent and variable - without a lot of solar and wind powering coming in, you don't really have a smart grid.

A smart grid is one that more carefully matches demand and supply - for examples, see this youtube video describing experimental smart grids in Germany that manage solar, wind and biogas sources:

CargoCult is correct. I'd like to also say that some of this technology is really, really interesting. Google Volkswagen-Lichtblick (you may need to have Google translate some of the pages for you) to see who's doing this for Germany.

Also in New Zealand there's a company called Whispergen that makes a really cool Stirling-cycle micro combined heat and power (MicroCHP) engine for the home or small business. You can power and heat your home from a natural gas source if that's cheaper, and sell power back to the grid (if your electricity distributor's network can handle the information loads required). Apparently they're wiring up most of Spain and Portugal with these things now.

But for the real innovators among you, that Whispergen unit can be modified to use any thermal differential - difference in heat - to generate power, because that's what Stirling engines do. Look up Stirling engines on Wiki and have a look. Then think about differences in temperature you can exploit, such as air/earth, air/water, or even sun/shadow. You can tap that and be a net producer of energy from your home, and sell the excess back to the grid.

But the grid has to be smart enough to handle it. So wire your member of parliament or congresscritter telling them that's what you want to do. At the moment, people are listening, so take advantage of the opportunity to give them a piece of your mind.

Originally posted by Nefarious Wheel:What's paying for the whole smart grid infrastructure upgrade - and yes, smart meters are only a component of it - is that with finer grained knowledge of electricity demand, they can spend less money on fuel.

That's it.

It's a simple thing, but it means quite literally billions of dollars in operations costs if they don't have to provide peak use generation capacity when it isn't needed.

With all due respect ... on its face this claim is either a complete non-sequitur, or says what I said.

"Finer grained knowledge of electricity demand" gains them nothing about understanding the power they must deliver NOW. It presumably would allow them improved accuracy at short-term demand forecasting.

I am very skeptical however of the claim for very large cost savings from this, because their current short-term forecasting is pretty damn good ... obvious why too.

The big payoff in efficiency comes from variable rates impacting the demand ... that's a different story.

The fact that the power company doesn't care what you're doing in the house, apart from how it affects demand, misses the privacy question. The point is that the data will be available for police. And if it starts being monitored at the level of individual devices, the power companies will probably start selling it for use by advertisers.

quote:

zelanniiNo one is going to get a job at a power company just to spy on people to learn their pattersn in the attempt to stalk them, or break into their house. No government agency cares about when you come and go or how much power you use at certain times of the day, they only care about OVERALL use, not individuals, and especially don;t care about anomolies in the system.

While the exact circumstances you cite may not be the exact case, there are numerous examples of the local power companies (in this area) reporting large electrical home users to the local police because of suspicions that "herbs" are being grown in the house. It never seemed to matter that the bills were being paid on time or anything else. No, I'm not going to cite news reports...

Failure to protect private user information so they can report information to the police. That's enough failure to turn me off to any of this.